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It’s an inventive take on appassimento, the ancient process of winemaking popularized in grape-growing regions around Venice. But here in Norfolk County, on the shores of Lake Erie, the sight of grapes shrivelling in white climate-controlled sheds is so peculiar that a visitor half expects to see a gondola floating by in nearby Port Dover.

“It’s very unusual, no question” says Mike McArthur, as we tour his Burning Kiln Winery on Front Rd. “But the kiln idea was almost an immediate connection for us. We just knew this was the way to go.”

Nobody starts a winery in Ontario to get rich. Even if you do everything right, everything could go wrong. The competition is fierce globally. The obstacles are agonizing locally. The costs are huge and the margins slim. It could take years — if ever — to recoup your seven-figure investment.

But just two years after its first harvest, Burning Kiln has managed to bottle this conventional wisdom and toss it out a barn window. In an industry that is often more gruelling hobby than lucrative business, Burning Kiln is rewriting the rules of viticulture, creating dazzling wines that are selling out, racking up awards and raising eyebrows across the oenophile world.

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And as of last Saturday, consumers can buy Burning Kiln wine at the LCBO. So if you want to know why the 2010 Strip Room, a Bordeaux blend, is the official red wine inside the Ontario Legislative Assembly or why the winery was just recognized with a Premier’s Award For Agri-Food Innovation and Excellence, you can do so without typing “Norfolk County” into your GPS.

“Five years ago, people said, ‘You will never sell a $50 bottle of wine,’ ” says McArthur, referring to his Kiln Hanger, a full-bodied red. “Well, we do and we don’t have any problems doing it.”

When McArthur and his partners started Burning Kiln, they realized the winery needed a hook. Ontario’s South Coast, after all, was a long way from the province’s recognized viticultural areas: Niagara Escarpment, Prince Edward County, Niagara-on-the-Lake and Pelee Island.

“The market is so competitive that you have to have a gimmick,” says George Taber, a wine historian and author of A Toast to Bargain Wines. “And the gimmick is innovation — something you are doing that nobody else is doing.”

This need to innovate comes at a time when wine quality is at an all-time high.

“When I was a young kid, there were really bad wines that adults drank,” says Elliott Morss, a former professor and economist who writes about addictive products. “You know, the sparkling rosés, the Chianti in the straw bottle. The most fundamental thing that’s happened worldwide is that all wines are good. So what you are seeing now is the rise of individual preferences.”

As Burning Kiln discovered, the appassimento process — the time-honoured technique of drying the grapes before pressing, which increases sugar content while intensifying flavour and aroma — has mass appeal. But using kilns was merely the final stage in a meticulously planned operation that could serve as a blueprint for future wineries.

The story begins nearly a decade ago, when McArthur, a lawyer, was guest lecturing at Brock University. One afternoon, he sat down in the cafeteria next to Anthony Shaw, a geography professor and fellow with Brock’s Cool Climate Oenology and Viticulture Institute.

McArthur told Shaw that he and business partner Dave Pond had just bought 37 acres of land near St. Williams, home to their Long Point Eco-Adventures. They also wanted to start a winery.

Tobacco used to be the cash crop in the fields that dot the horizon from St. Thomas to Cayuga, Woodstock to Turkey Point. McArthur’s grandfather was a tobacco farmer when he arrived from the former Czech Republic in the 1930s.

As that industry was extinguished in the ’90s, McArthur wondered if vinifera grapes could fill the agricultural void. Shaw thought conditions — the sand-plain, a temperate climate, moderate winters, the jet stream, the lake reservoir, nutrient-rich soil — would be ideal.

He asked McArthur if he could install environmental sensors on the Eco-Adventures property. A few months later, Shaw called with startling news: “I think you guys are sitting on the next great wine region in Canada.”

This research, says McArthur, was critical to the success of Burning Kiln. You can’t control the weather. But, increasingly, weather can control a vineyard.

“Winemakers throughout the world have been dealing with climate change for the last 10 or 15 years,” says Brian Schmidt, chair of VQA Ontario and winemaker at Niagara’s Vineland Estate Winery.

This summer, between May and July, Schmidt’s vineyard received only 46 millimetres of precipitation. As a result, his son and nephew were out in the fields day after day, driving spikes into the scorched earth and using water lances to reach the root systems of younger, vulnerable vines.

When we chat, Schmidt is on his tractor, in the midst of spraying vines with a solution that will deliver small amounts of nitrogen, magnesium and boron directly to the leaves for absorption.

As he observes: “This is an expense that I’m not traditionally accustomed to.”

Ontario winemakers are now deploying wind machines, drip-irrigation systems and crop covers, in a pitched battle with Mother Nature. But reacting to climate change in real time leaves no time to plan for the distant future.

“The growers are really doing a good job in adjusting gradually,” says Brock’s Shaw. “The problem is most growers are not thinking about long-term changes in climate because they are just trying to adjust to the day-to-day activities and year-to-year variations.”

A warmer climate, he adds, could change the industry in profound ways, including the types of varietals that eventually flourish in Ontario.

Burning Kiln started by ordering top-quality vinifera vines from France. They were grafted to assorted North American rootstocks. In 2007, the first eight acres were planted; around eight acres followed a year later. The vineyard is now 28 acres and varietals include Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Riesling, Cabernet Franc, Merlot and Savignon.

In other words, Burning Kiln sounds like it could be somewhere in Europe.

Squinting into the sunshine as we sit on the patio, where visitors are sampling wine and tapas, McArthur unfolds a South Coast map that lists more than a dozen wineries and grape growers in the area, enough to warrant an “Emerging Region” designation from Wine Country Ontario.

“The business itself has been expanding,” says Hillary Dawson, president of the Wine Council of Ontario. “Probably six or seven years ago, there were maybe 20 or 30 wineries that were very active commercially. Now there are probably 70 to 80 that do that.”

According to the LCBO, sales of all Ontario wines reached nearly $360 million in 2011-12. This included about 1,000 Ontario VQA wines from 88 wineries. VQA wines now boast the highest sales growth for all major categories.

But is this enough? As the largest buyer of alcohol in the world, should the LCBO be doing more to help local producers? Why does the abundance of provincial regulations, some of which are nearly a century old, feel like an albatross around the necks of winemakers? The rules cover everything from warehouse location to how and where wine can be sold to the use and price of grapes.

“We are the only jurisdiction on the planet that deals with a marketing board,” says Dawson. “Every other wine region in the world is a free market in grapes and that’s helped drive quality.”

The bleak reality is this: If a winery is not selling to the LCBO, it has few retailing options. It can sell at the vineyard or directly to restaurants. And even if a winery gets into the LCBO, it has no real say in marketing. Then there are the volume and sales requirements, which can bring a quick end to the regulated odyssey.

Stouffville, the province’s other “Emerging Region,” is home to Willow Springs Winery. Its wine was sold inside the LCBO in 2005 but five years later was delisted.

“It’s all targets,” says winemaker Mario Testa, who has since diversified his business by using the picturesque vineyard and farmhouse as an events space. “If you don’t meet your targets, you’re out.”

The irony for Testa is that he could not sell his wine inside the grocery stores he also owned. He’d like to see the rules relaxed, if not changed. He’d like to sell Willow Springs wine through local merchants or even farmers markets.

“Sooner or later, it has to change,” Testa says, shrugging as we sit inside his second-floor office. “We’re so primitive. We’re in the new millennium here. Let’s get with the times. How does any of this make sense?”

In a written response, Julie Rosenberg, a senior communications consultant for the LCBO, says the Crown organization has many programs and initiatives to promote awareness of Ontario wines.

These include shelf space and in-store location (at the front of most stores); expanded VQA sections in new or renovated stores; a “Best of Ontario” section in select locations; Ontario wine educational training for LCBO employees in 317 stores; a buying unit dedicated to provincial wine; exclusive merchandising and government support programs.

Matt Pelling, a political-science graduate student at Simon Fraser University, has been studying the Ontario wine industry as part of an international project. He was also a participant in a wine conference held in Burnaby this month.

Pelling says the LCBO distribution model generates heated criticism but this censure is often misplaced: “The LCBO mandate is to maximize revenue for the province. There is a much wider public policy function of a Crown distributor than just selling wine.”

McArthur, who is thrilled to finally be in the LCBO, says the problem may simply be puritanical baggage — a cultural hangover of sorts. As a child, he recalls going to the liquor store with his father. The elder McArthur would handwrite a code and slide it under a wicket window. Then the clerk would return with the bottle in a brown paper bag.

It was like belonging to a secret society.

“To me, the way the whole industry has been set-up, is on the basis that wine is the Devil’s juice,” says McArthur. “So we have to control it and prohibit people and watch it and count bottles and all this kind of stuff. It’s really crazy.”

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